We Live in Hell
I am fully embracing being a godless heathen because I want to be closer to my humanity. You can thank 2020 for that shit, and the Crown.
I.
My earliest memory of hell happened inside of a tent revival, somewhere in South Florida. Tent revivals, as I understand them now, are events in which “lost souls” are “saved”, by baptism, after hearing a lot of shouting about sin, the devil, and, his primary residence, hell. I went to this revival with my Haitian grandmother, where we sat on bleachers surrounded by a large pool, so everyone could have a good view of the folk offering themselves up to be dunked into a body of water meant to purify them of their humanness, or their “sin”.
When we talk about sin, we are essentially talking about the stuff that humanity is made of, so when we talk about being made “blemish-less”, being washed “clean” by “the blood of the Lamb” (that’s a metaphor for blood sacrifice, btw), we are actually talking about somehow erasing what we are and can only be: human.
I was only four or five when I watched this spectacle and I remember feeling panicked by it all. The constant shouting when someone, inevitably, climbed down the bleachers towards the preacher who was asking the crowd who among them would heed the call of Jesus and “join his flock” by washing themselves clean in “the purifying waters of baptism”.
There was hollering and wailing, especially when the preacher spoke of the end of days while reminding us all those who were not baptized would not ascend to heaven to live with our “Heavenly Father”. Instead, they would be condemned to hell and would bathe in the fires of hell for all of eternity.
My stomach churned as I watched the many brown faces contorted in distress as the preacher, now ringmaster, played the harp of fear, fingering the strings to reach everyone’s shame — the drug addict, the fornicator, the deadbeat, the faithless, the unbelieving. The panic started in my stomach, so I bit my fingernails but I didn’t have any from biting them so often which made the panic slide into my leg and my right knee bounced up and down, uncontrollably.
I didn’t want to go to hell! I didn’t want to spend an eternity in agony, watching others burning, their skin bubbling from exposure to heat and flames.
I grabbed my grandmother’s sleeve and told her I wanted to be saved.
I remember, as though I am peering at a photograph, how incredibly delighted she was with me. That smile she gave me is forever seared in my mind. The delight of an adult was already my drug of choice: she looked at me with unwavering pride, as though I was perfect, and her eyes filled up to the brim with water. She shouted, “Merci Jezi! Merci Bondye!,” while carrying me down the bleachers, through the adoring crowd of brown faces, cheering and praising God that this small child wanted to accept the love of Jesus, to be made pure again through baptism.
By the time we got to the preacher, I began to feel even more nervous, primarily because I didn’t fully understand what was going on or what my request actually meant. I was responding to the shouting and cheering, the hollering and praise, not specifically for Jesus but for me. I wanted my grandmother to look at me as though I were perfect for the rest of my life.
Instead, she argued with the preacher who told her despite my fervor for God, I was too young to be baptized. Baptism, he told her, was a personal decision. A decision a small child of four or five could not yet make. Also, the church didn’t allow baptism for anyone under the age of twelve so I would have to wait just a little longer to fully accept Jesus Christ as “my Lord and Savior”.
I sobbed immediately and told my grandmother I was scared I would die before I could get baptized and I would go to hell. She told me God would understand, that God could see in my heart how badly I wanted to be baptized and that I would certainly live long enough to get baptized.
With the way the preacher was talking during the revival, I wasn’t entirely convinced she was right…
II.
I lived in hell for twenty-two years.
I grew up in a doomsday cult and was raised — if you can call it that— by a malignant narcissist mother who sexually abused me, physically beat me, financially exploited me, and verbally and mentally tortured me for two entire decades.
Fear was the primary preoccupation of my existence.
I learned how to dissociate right around the same time I learned how to read. I was scared to go to sleep. I was scared to wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I was scared to get caught lying. I was scared of not being impressive enough in my studies. I was scared of having bad dreams and night terrors. I was scared of pissing the bed. I was scared of looking at myself in the mirror. I was scared of my body. I was scared of my mind. I was scared of speaking up. I was scared of thinking for myself.
I was so scared of going to hell, I couldn’t fully recognize I was already living in hell.
I believed in God because I had no choice but to—my reality was that my family openly worshiped a deity, a very strange thing for modern humans to be doing—but I went to school with a lot of kids who didn’t believe in God, or anything, really. In Elementary school, the kids I knew who were “believers” were the Black kids, the Cuban kids, and the Jewish kids.
The white kids were all atheists or agnostics or went to church only for special occasions like Mothers Day, Easter Sunday, and maybe Christmas. I grew up in South Florida during the 90s Culture Wars that included AIDS panic turning into full-blown queer panic, the theory of evolution being challenged by the conspiracy theory of “Creationism” and the problem of skeptics (convinced against belief in God due to science) in a “Christian nation”.
These counter-narratives were primary narratives for me — queer people, myself included, were evidence of sin and needed to be converted to normalcy in “conversion camps”, too many white people liked science and facts more than they liked God and toxic nationalism and, finally, science was pushing back against the folk psychology that caused people to join cults or participate in violent race massacres and other assorted nationalist violence against those deemed Other by none other than God itself.
I believed, with lots of exposure through repetition and an echo chamber of equally indoctrinated folk, much of this to be true in the way I realized it was true that the sky is the color blue. I was conflating superstition with empirical truth, is what I’m getting at.
At the liberal Montessori public elementary school I attended, I observed that the Black kids went to church on Sundays but I went to church on Saturdays so I shared in common with Jewish kids, observing a Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, but I never went to the synagogue and we read the Bible, not the Torah. And then there was the whole Christ as savior conspiracy I believed in but was not part of Judaism. The Cuban kids were Christians too, but often came from families that were staunchly Catholic, and as such, I was to stay away from them because my “church” taught that Catholics were idolators and worshiped the Virgin Mary over her son, Jesus Christ, and that was a big no no for “proper Christians”.
But the white kids believed in things like science and were skeptics, whatever that meant. They talked primarily either about parents who believed in intelligent life in space, so basically alien conspiracy theorists, or they talked about logic, math, and needing to prove the existence of things. No one could prove the existence of God outside of a very old book of accounts of the deity, but no modern, living human had ever had an actual experience with this deity so it couldn’t exist — except for as a figment of one’s imagination.
I thought these kids and their families were insane.
The alien conspiracy theorists I could comprehend but this bullshit about “proving” the existence of God? That’s blasphemy. Humans wouldn’t dare think a thought like that and expect to survive God’s wrath!
The white kids were allowed to watch things I couldn’t watch because the cult I was a part of made a clear distinction between the “secular world” and the Christian world — God’s World. If it wasn’t Disney, shows on Nickelodeon, the Discovery Channel and/or PBS, I wasn’t watching it. At the age of twenty-eight, I watched my first full episode of the Simpsons. I missed out on all the good Black movies from the late 90s into the mid-10s. When my mother was at her deepest points of cult membership, and this dedication came in waves and was specifically tied to the cycles of poverty we had to navigate, I could not listen to secular music or watch secular television.
My friends needed to come from Christian families and my parent would have to vet the parents first if I wanted to hang out with friends outside of school, during the day, under her supervision. I did not see my friends often or on purpose because the real caveat was that the families needed to be specifically Seventh Day Adventist. They needed to be a part of the cult we were apart of and I didn’t know too many people at school who were in a cult. I didn’t even know I was a part of a cult, let alone what a cult even was, but I did recognize that God and Christianity meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, which puzzled me.
We were all reading the same book, which had the same rules and expectations, and there were people who had read the book who didn’t believe it, at all.
By the time my window for baptism came up, I was feeling afraid about being found out for being queer. I made a bargain with God, as I had become accustomed to making lots of bargains with God, including asking for the capacity to forget my dreams so I wouldn’t have nightmares about being devoured by a werewolf every night—my mind’s metaphor for my mother abusing me.
A few days after that petition, I noticed I wasn’t having the nightmares. Instead, God granted me the power of dissociation and the gift of sleep paralysis. I also became an insomniac because when God does something, it does it all the way, no half stepping. In my poisoned mind, these developments were a miracle: I asked my deity to do a Thing and then A Thing happened, though not the requested thing, just a regular ole Thing.
A few weeks after my baptism, the problem of Job came up in our Sabbath School classes.
We were told Job suffered because he believed in the promise of God’s righteousness and that he would be vindicated if only he continued to believe in God, despite the hardships God had wrought against Job. When I went home to read some passages (and then the entire book) from Job on my own, I noticed Job was arguing with God in a manner one could call disrespectful — blasphemous, even and no one made that observation while capitulating about how wonderful it is to be able to suffer joyfully for a deity.
In the book, Job asks his neighbors how could they worship —let alone believe in— a God full of endless cruelty against his creations. Those weak, smoothed brained motherfuckers told Job he was wrong for characterizing God as anything other than all-knowing, all-powerful, and thus all perfect, instead they told Job his suffering was meant for something bigger, discounting the small matter of Job having lost his family and his home, despite being a faithful follower of God, despite his attempts to be a good and decent human being, just because God decided to make Job’s life a living hell cause it felt like it that day.
Job recognized something his neighbors did not: God was actually capable of great evil and someone needed to hold the deity to task for its participation in the torture of the human beings under its grasp.
From Edward L. Greenstein’s recent translation of the book of Job, Job tells the deity, “I’m fed up! I won’t live forever! Stop (tormenting) me! For my days are mere breath.” and he continues, “ What is a mortal that you treat him as important? Why can’t you just look away from me? Why have you made me your target? How could I be a burden to you?”
Job continues, essentially building a case against the deity, putting it on trial to tell God he didn’t quite like his attitude towards humanity and found him to not be so worthy of praise, especially if he was going to be a wild dick to everyone, just because! In certain terms, Job tells his neighbors this deity is actually malevolent and that he’s done worshiping a tyrant.
I very much enjoyed Job’s energy. It spoke to something primal and ancient in me and I decided I, too, would tell God to fuck off.
III.
There’s a reason we’ve all collectively referred to 2020 as a ‘hell year’ — it’s because we were all living in hell.
To my mind, hell has always been largely a metaphor for a state of mind caused by a series of untenable events and occurrences that seek to break down one’s humanity and one’s grasp of sanity and reality.
Hell is a concentration camp.
Hell is living in an abusive home, with no escape. Hell is being forced to ignore a mass death event. Hell is being locked in your home for months at a time because you fear exposure to certain death whenever you leave the confines of the place you call home. Hell is not having anywhere to call home. Hell is listening to lies on a steady loop for years on end while you struggle to grasp what you know is real. Hell is losing your job, then being forced to move away from the life you’ve built. Hell is recognizing, suddenly, some of your family and some of the friends whom you’ve chosen as family, suddenly want you to accept Jesus Christ as your “Lord and Savior”, and wouldn’t you know it, Christ came back as a President.
Hell is watching once perfectly sane people choose a political cult to hide in to escape real life.
Hell is real and we are living in it.
As much as I’ve hoped for years and years of my life, there is no deity coming to save us from the hellscape we are forced to navigate because humans create the shared reality we inhabit. There is no deity that created this current set of events or the circumstances we are navigating because humans have created the circumstances and events we are now navigating. There is no deity to appease with human sacrifice —we’ve already given close to half a million lives as a blood sacrifice and nothing has changed.
We die because we are human. We are some sort of finite universal essence encased in fragile flesh and fickle sinew.
What angers me more than anything is how young we die here, how consistently we perish here on this death colony, and how, as we attempt to navigate lives of decency, of meaning, there is a machine grinding us down, electro-shock therapying our brains into a science fiction of what we are actually experiencing.
IV.
American Christians are a terrifying lot of people to be mixed up with. The mass delusion of thinking oneself as being “chosen” by a deity creates a powerful sense of superiority over those who have not been “chosen” but, more importantly, it creates a powerful sense of being wholly different than an entire species to which you are a part of and not at all different from in any significant way.
I have known this truth the entirety of my life: the truth that God is a part of the many realities one can choose to inhabit as a part of the imagined community that we call America. That we shape God into a reflection of our humanity and that reflection of our humanness is all the deeply flawed, scary shit that humans are capable of doing — genocide, war, the abdication of community responsibility, incapability of being able to live in community with one another.
We, humans, do these things. No one else.
Not Satan or a devil, or any other ghoulish superstition we are always quick to invent. There are no “lizard people”, no “cabal of satanic pedophiles”. There are, instead, humans who have tricked us into thinking they have accumulated wealth and power because they were “set apart”, thanks to pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories while the rest of us toil and labor through the tenuous work of humanity. And there are parents, caregivers, friends, cousins, and other relations who do the work of dismantling the lives of children by wielding power and control over those they’ve been tasked to protect and guide, weaponizing sex to obliterate the psyches of the children around them, to ground them into dust, into nothingness for a taste of the power and the authority they’ve been told they are entitled to, by any means necessary.
Money isn’t real, neither is the Economy, but those fictions bear real consequences on our real human lives every single day.
We have so many secular names for a deity with many faces and many avatars and permutations, but we, collectively, are not very good at acknowledging this particular truth. We make avatars of the deity and then we give these avatars the power to dictate our lives and we stand back and watch them wreak havoc on us, powerless to do anything with the fictions we’ve carefully crafted in the imaginary place we call a home.
Even now, we still haven’t figured out that we make the world.
We give our lives meaning and purpose. We decide what to leave behind and what to take with us, forward, into a future.
V.
Job was a metaphor in the way God is a metaphor for the complexity of navigating the human experience. Job is all of us. We have been stripped of everything — our connections, our jobs, our homes, our friends and families, our status in the world. We have been polite and pious. We have been faithful and steadfast. We have given the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again. And still, nothing gets better, it all gets worse, and we sink into despair.
Despairing resets our circuitry, however, if we are willing to embrace the potent power of despair, which is anger.
Like Job, one of my favorite thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard, argues that despair is one of the most powerful emotions humans can use to their benefit. The recognition that nothing and no-one is coming to save you causes our rational minds to spring into action, to remind us of our capacity to survive. Our survival is predicated on our capacity to reason — what exactly is occurring in this reality I’m inhabiting that is becoming untenable and, therefore must change, if I am to survive? Why is it occurring, in the first place? What am I contributing to this reality that has me by the neck? How do I intend to recapture this reality and shape it into one that is survivable? If no one is coming to save me, how the fuck can I save myself? Are there other people who are also trying to figure out how to save themselves? And if I bound up my liberation in theirs, could we all possibly save ourselves?
This is the work American Christianity likes to think it is doing but this — reasoning with an unknowable, nonexistent deity as a metaphor for grappling with one’s humanity— is the work of philosophy, not religion. Kierkegaard like Job spent his life challenging God, arguing there is no such thing as blind faith, that the idea of blind faith was in fact an insult to free will and the human capacity for rational thinking and reasoning.
If humanity was going to believe in a deity and pledge its survival on said deity, then that deity needed to be questioned and reasoned with on a regular basis, otherwise, the deity was a tyrant seeking to destroy the human species if what it desired most was total and complete submission and obedience.
No one and no-thing that seeks your complete submission means you well.
Blind allegiance is just blindness, and nothing else.
VI.
It took many years to slough off the fear of engaging in blasphemy, but when I tried it out a few times after leaving the doomsday cult, I realized the immense power of the human mind. There was never any actual evidence of punishment outside of the fictional stories retold in a very old book, written and re-written by lots of people with very specific agendas, chief among them finding a powerful way to shape the behavior of other human beings.
All of the fears my mind contained had been sculpted over years of indoctrination, from exposure to repetitive rhetoric, maintained by a closed-loop system of isolation and extreme ideological and physical separation from the world. When I became of the world, my mind was freed to the actual system of consequences in the world, none of which included being smote or turned into a pillar of salt.
If my heart got broken it wasn’t by virtue of the fact that I’d fallen in love with a woman, it was just because people of all genders have the capacity to hurt other human beings. If I stubbed my toe after thinking a particularly horrendous thought about God, it wasn’t because I blasphemed. The two weren’t correlated or related, at all. I stubbed my toe because I live in a soft, squishy, clumsy sack of meat.
Things happen in our lives that don’t require explanation, simply because they are part of being a sentient human being experiencing the world, and as such, we do not need to be shielded from or warned away from experiencing the world with all of our senses, through all of our reasoning and cognitive capacities.
With the help of my mother and the cult, I lived in a world created for me with imaginary obstacles propped up in opposition to my having been “saved” and I had to live with all of the imaginary villains and ghouls that populated this fantasy world I would soon be taken away from by way of vacating my human body, and dying.
When the reality you live in isn’t ideal, escapism becomes a means of self-soothing that seems to enable you to navigate all you’d rather not have to navigate, but escapism isn’t real and the world still exists as an often difficult place you have to find a way to survive in.
Despite their best effort, my mother and the cult couldn’t fully convince me that I needed to be saved because I didn’t see myself as a sinner needing saving. I was bigger and grander and freer than that — I was very pleased to call myself human. When what I knew about my humanity was shown to me to be true, primarily through the love and friendship of other members of my species, when my innate goodness and worthiness was reflected back to me, I recognized that as real truth, as reality.
God supposedly said, “For when two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them,” and I understood that to mean when the members of my species reflect back to me the goodness that I know dwells inside of me, when that is as obvious to others as it is to me than I have found a path worth following, I’ve found what we call a shared reality — a place where we come together to collectively agree to inhabit the same frame of mind, typically caused by a confirmation of reciprocal thoughts, opinions, and an experience of life as series of events and occurrences that seek to bring clarity to one’s human experience.
This what shapes what we recognize as the real world.
Right now, the real world is a verifiable hell but I’m not scared of hell anymore — and neither should you be.
—
Feels good to be back after depression beat my ass for a couple of weeks (but I beat her ass, right back!! We’re choosing violence in 2021!). I appreciate every single gesture of love and support so many of you extended to me. I’d been thinking about this essay for weeks and at first, it was a tirade, but then I eased into my depression (if you can even say that!) and sat with the sads for a bit and realized there was information to pull out of this particular meeting with my depression. Those episodes are rare. I survived! I played a lot of Animal Crossing (and yes I want to be friends with you so we can visit one another’s islands, send me your friend codes ASAP!!!) to get through it.
I also started binging the Crown on Netflix and began playing around with the idea of writing an essay about exploring the shift from “believer” to “non-believer”, upon watching Elizabeth indoctrinate herself into believing that by the act of becoming Queen she was physical representative of the Christian deity. It blew my mind the sort of lies white people have historically told themselves to defend their use of colonialism and imperialism as their primary navigation of the human experience and how I, as an oppressed Black person, had gotten caught up in that Big Lie, too but, most specifically, having an Uber driver tell me matter of factly, in response to us living in hell that, “Prayer don’t even feel like it work no mo,” is what really sparked this essay.
That statement hit my gut with a truth rock I hadn’t felt comfortable articulating for months.
Finally, here’s a bass-heavy playlist called It’s the Bass For Me inspired by SOPHIE’s (RIP) production, my memories of being a bird and bring the club all the goddamn time, and attempting to figure out a soundtrack for what hell might sound like. *travis scott voice* It’s lit!
Oh, and if you’re interested, you can grab a copy of Edward L. Greenstein’s translation of Job here. It is really one of the best books of the Bible and this translation is subversive and spicy!